Ripening
By Breena Clarke
Body like a two-week-old banana ripened/blackened/darkened long past fresh and yellow. Black dark bananas have deep flavor and an aroma that has gone past merely sweet – a complex balance of pleasant and appalling, frightening, stinky, sour. Husky aroma is, for me, the idea that a thing is full of layers, is dense, exudes a complex smell. They used to say, “A whole lot of yellow gone to waste.” This they said about plain, ordinary-looking girls with banana-colored, yellow skin that was supposed to be a prize. A lucky break for a colored girl to be less black, more like white. My next-door neighbor was such a yellow girl whose yellow was wasted on a not-pretty face. Her teeth weren’t good either, not well cared for. My sisters and I were nut colored types – pecan, Brazil nut, peanut, walnut. We were brown. Our teeth were well cared for by attentive parents. Now I’m ripened to blackness figuratively if not actually. Wrinkled skin that miracle potions call crepe-y skin. I call it grandmother skin. I recall touching the cheeks of my grandmothers and touching soft, flaccid flesh that exposed snakes of veins. They smelled like the places they lived, the smell of “old.” I played with my grandmother’s purses. They smelled like old face powder and handkerchiefs (before Kleenex they were in every woman’s purse) and Doan’s pills. Do I now smell like that? Ripening and rotting are twin shirts hanging side by side, blowing in a breeze, drying in sunshine in our rowhouse backyard where I discovered maggots in a garbage pail.
Josephine Baker, icon of colored glamour, danced with a ring of bananas around her waist and captivated Europe. Yes, yes, her war work rehabilitates an image of prancing around nearly naked with phallic fruit dangling. But I’m tired of her, of black women saying, “See, See, they worshipped her beauty.” She latched onto an idea about the white gaze and exploited it. Presenting her satin skin and chocolate good looks for their pleasure. Good for her! Also, the edible aspect of bananas, their consumable sexuality fascinated audiences. Fuck yourself with one or peel it, tongue it and, god almighty, eat it or leave it in a corner to ripen - really blacken. Past the point of freckling, they’re no good for cornflakes. Some houseflies hatched inside during the winter and buzzed and circulated my kitchen as the weather warmed. Unable to get out, but unable to thrive inside, they made straight for the fruit as it ripened on the counter. Inside the blackened skin pouches, banana flesh had turned completely to mush. The flies wanted to make my fruit useful to themselves, but I swatted them along and made banana bread. My bananas, my black dark bananas! I baked a tasty wonder by combining flour, sugar, and butter with the bowl of dead mushiness.
I’ve decided I want to keep on rotting and give something back to the earth – a tree, maybe a Dogwood. Mash me up to make a slurry for the earth, understanding that the blacker I get, the more intense my flavor with an aroma like wine. Is banana the only fruit that sweetens as it rots? It’s an appropriate analogy for my aging. I am now most like a rotten piece of fruit, a compost, the sum of my deeds – good and bad. I used to imagine myself returning to existence as some charming animal if I was fortunate. I liked to think I’d make a wonderful Labrador Retriever. Now I think I can be most useful to a dung beetle, a complex ball of shit that holds the earth together.
